Miramar, FL VHS Conversion & Photo Scanning | Service Guide
By Greg E.
Our table at 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. Every order starts with somebody going through the box by hand. Miramar customers get the same call, and the same table.
Does Forever Studios serve Miramar, Florida?
Yes. We drive to you, and your collection never enters a shipping network. There is no drop-off counter in Miramar, no partner shop and no franchise. We come to the house, sort the collection with you, and the same company that picked it up is the one that digitizes it, 40 miles up the road.
- The studio
- 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. 40 miles from Miramar. One building, no partner shops.
- Getting it to us
- Concierge pickup across Miramar, Thursdays. Free on orders of $250 or more, otherwise $30 plus mileage.
- What it costs
- Per item, not per box. $12 a tape, $0.50 a photo, $0.75 a slide, $15 a film reel or cassette, $13 a disc, $35 a hand restoration.
- How long
- 3 to 4 weeks standard. Rush is +25% at five days, +100% next day.
- What comes back
- Your originals, insured at declared value, with the files on USB, DVD or digital delivery.
Not sure what you have? Describe the pile over the phone and we will tell you what is worth doing.
Call (561) 235-7808. A real person answers, Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5.
Where we actually are
Close enough to drive. Or we come to you.
We are one studio in Boca Raton, about an hour from Miramar. Bring it in yourself and hand it to the people who will do the work, or stay home and we will collect it on Thursday.
What matters is not how close the drop-off is. It is how many buildings your originals pass through between leaving your house and coming home.
For us that number is one. For a mail-in warehouse, nobody will tell you.
Or bring it in yourself
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
Driving directions from Miramar1
building your media ever enters
an hour
door to door, Miramar to us
Logged by name on arrival. Checked three times by hand. Brought back the same way it left.
Call the studio
A real person answers.
Tell us what is in the box and we will put a pickup on the Thursday route to your Miramar address.
What Miramar sends us
South Florida collections, mostly.
Since 2007 you start to recognize a city by what turns up in its boxes.
From $12 per tape
VHS and camcorder tape
Miramar is a tape city more than a film city, because most of the houses here were not built yet when people were shooting 8mm. What comes out of a Miramar closet is VHS, VHS-C and Hi8 from the late eighties through the two thousands, then MiniDV: christenings, graduations from the neighborhood schools, birthdays at the regional park, and a lot of footage sent to or brought from family abroad.
- VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Hi8, Video8, Digital8, MiniDV, Betamax
- Mold on the tape and in the housing cleaned before any playback
- One MP4 file per tape, audio transferred untouched
From $0.50 per photo
Photo and slide scanning
Prints outnumber slides here by a wide margin, and a lot of what we receive is a mixed box: loose photographs from the sixties and seventies in the east of the city alongside nineties and two thousands prints from the west, plus older pictures carried in from the Caribbean that are often the only surviving copy. Anything curled, stuck to an album page or with softened emulsion is handled one at a time.
- 600 DPI archival scanning, prints, albums, slides and negatives
- Prints stuck to magnetic album pages separated by hand, never forced
- Color-shift correction on faded prints and Kodachrome
From $15 per reel
8mm and 16mm film
Film turns up in Miramar mostly in the older eastern neighborhoods and in boxes that came here from somewhere else, which means the reels are usually the oldest thing in the house and have moved at least once. Reels that have sat in a Florida garage often have vinegar syndrome or shrinkage, and vinegar spreads to whatever is in the can next to it.
- Regular 8, Super 8 and 16mm, sound or silent
- Frame by frame, cleaned and spliced by hand first
- Vinegar syndrome and shrinkage assessed before you commit
Published pricing, no estimate games
Ten tapes is $120. That is the whole quote.
No box fee, no bundle you have to fill, no per-order minimum. Call with a rough count and we will price it at your table in Miramar before anything goes in the van.
Everything we accept
If it holds a memory, we have seen it.
Bring us the formats nobody else will touch. We keep the decks running for machines that stopped being made decades ago.
VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, S-VHS-C, Betamax, Hi8, Video8, Digital8, MiniDV, MicroMV, and 3/4 inch U-matic
8mm, Super 8 and 16mm reels, sound or silent, up to 400 feet, scanned frame by frame to true 4K
Loose prints from wallet size to 11x14, bound and self-adhesive albums, 35mm slides, Kodachrome, medium format, and color or black and white negatives
Compact cassette, microcassette, reel-to-reel, DAT, vinyl records, and 8-track
DVD, mini DVD, CD, Blu-ray, and legacy data discs recovered where the surface allows
Not sure what you have? Photograph the pile and call. Most people describing “old home movies” turn out to have two or three different formats in the same box, and each one needs a different machine.
Why Miramar collections do not wait well
Seventy-five percent humidity, most of the year.
This is not a scare tactic. It is the reason we tell Miramar callers not to leave it another season.
~75%
Average relative humidity in Miramar
85%+
Routine wet season readings
Broward humidity sits around 75 percent most of the year and pushes past 85 percent in the wet season, and the muggy stretch here runs close to eight months, from early April into December. The county takes about 60 inches of rain a year. None of that troubles a tape in air conditioning. It is a serious problem for a tape in a garage off Miramar Parkway, where the binder holding magnetic particles to the backing absorbs moisture, softens and sheds onto the heads the first time you press play.
The storms compress years of that into a weekend. Katrina came ashore on August 25th 2005 right at the county line that forms Miramar's southern boundary. Irma arrived on September 10th 2017, and the weather service recorded 50 mile per hour sustained winds with an 84 mile per hour gust here, with six to ten inches of rain across the county and more of it inland, on this side. Three quarters of South Florida lost power. The power goes, the air conditioning goes with it, and a closet that was stable for thirty years spends a week at outdoor humidity.
Where they end up instead: a climate-controlled floor, not a garage in August.
Every year a tape waits in a Miramar closet is footage you do not get back. We are in Miramar on Thursdays.
(561) 235-7808How it works from Miramar
Four steps, no guesswork.
Step 1
Call and describe it
Tell us roughly what you have. We will tell you what is worth doing, what is not, and what it costs, before anything moves.
Step 2
We come to you
We are in Miramar on Thursdays. We come to the house or the condo, help you sort what is worth doing, and carry it out ourselves.
Step 3
We log it by name
Everything is counted and recorded against your order the day it lands, so you get a real number before any work begins.
Step 4
It comes home
Checked three times by hand, then your originals come back to Miramar alongside the finished files. Turnaround is 3 to 4 weeks.
If you are still comparing
The mail-in companies put this in their terms, not their ads.
We are not going to characterize them. These are their own published words.
“YOU RECOGNIZE THAT YOU MAY NOT RECEIVE YOUR MATERIALS BACK … BY PLACING AN ORDER WITH LEGACYBOX, YOU ACCEPT THIS RISK.”
Legacybox Services Terms & Conditions. Capitalization theirs.
“…we may choose to compensate you for loss or damage; or we may decline, entirely, to issue a refund or provide any compensatory monies.”
Southtree Services Terms & Conditions.
“IMEMORIES MAXIMUM LIABILITY … WILL BE LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT OF FEES ACTUALLY PAID BY YOU TO IMEMORIES FOR THE APPLICABLE SERVICE … FOR THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PERIOD IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO WHEN ANY CLAIM OR CAUSE OF ACTION AROSE, OR $100, WHICHEVER IS LESS.”
iMemories Terms of Service. Capitalization theirs.
Legacybox, Southtree and Kodak Digitizing are the same company, AMB Media LLC, in the same Chattanooga building. For what it is worth, nobody outside our own staff handles a Miramar collection at any point.
One building
Once it reaches us it stays here.
Never sub-contracted, never sent on.
Zachary Goldberg
Founder and Owner, on site in Boca Raton
We built Forever Studios because every family deserves to have their memories preserved the right way, by real people, with real equipment, under one roof. Miramar families trust us because the process is simple: we come to you, we carry it ourselves, and our own team does the work.
Miramar, Florida
The city your collection came from.
Miramar was incorporated in 1955 with fewer than two hundred people and then filled in twice. The eastern half went up in the sixties, when the city went from 5,485 residents to nearly 24,000 in ten years. The western half went up between 1990 and 2010, when it went from 40,663 to 122,041. So the boxes here hold two separate eras: film from the first build-out, and tape from the second.
Park
Miramar Regional Park
A 173 acre park on Miramar Parkway a mile west of I-75, with baseball, soccer, football and cricket fields, courts, two playgrounds, a dog park and a skate park, plus an aquatic complex and rentable pavilions. For thirty years this has been the default place in the city for a birthday party or a Saturday game, which puts it on a great deal of camcorder tape.
Civic and arts
Miramar Cultural Center, ArtsPark
The city's performing arts building at 2400 Civic Center Place, next to City Hall in the Town Center, with a theatre seating around 800, the Ansin Family Art Gallery, a dance studio and banquet space. Recitals, school matinees and community theatre run through this building, and those are the evenings families film.
Sports
Ansin Sports Complex
A 24 acre track and community facility on Miramar Boulevard, built with land and money given by the Ansin family and dedicated to their parents. It has hosted national meets, including track and field for the 2022 National Senior Games, and it is where a lot of this city's school athletics footage was shot.
Nature
Miramar Pineland Natural Area
A county natural area on South University Drive, a surviving piece of the pine flatwoods and wet prairie that once ran up to the headwaters of Snake Creek. Broward County bought the land in 1989 and opened it to the public in 2013, and the trail through it is a short accessible loop.
Park
Vizcaya Park
A 20 acre city park on Southwest 55th Street with a 7,600 square foot community centre, a splash pad, football and soccer fields, a basketball court and four covered pavilions. It is a neighbourhood park rather than a destination, which is exactly why it appears in so many family videos.
Education
Miramar High School
The high school on Southwest 89th Avenue, open since 1970 and one of the oldest institutions in the city, with aviation and International Baccalaureate programmes and a football programme that won a state title in 2009. For families who arrived in the sixties and seventies wave, the graduation footage in the box was shot here.
Where our Miramar customers are
142K+
Population
1955
Incorporated
40 mi
To our studio
an hour
Drive time
Or bring it yourself
Rather not wait for the route?
You are welcome to drive it down and hand it to us. Same studio, same people, about an hour from Miramar.
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
What Miramar-area customers say
Rated 4.9 from 3,937 verified reviews.
★★★★★
The films you worked with were 80 years old. I was very impressed with the sections of movies you were able to copy and enhance. My family couldn't believe how good they looked.
★★★★★
Received my link, very easy process. Shipping, status updates, app usage all were terrific. Even came through with a delivery right before Christmas. Was able to re-live memories with all my families over the holidays. Thank you Forever Studios
★★★★★
I've always hesitated to drop my valuable memories in a box and ship it off to parts unknown, but Forever Studios has made converting my old tapes easy. Five stars!
Frequently asked, Miramar
The questions South Florida callers actually ask.
Do you pick up in Miramar?
Yes. We are in Broward on Thursdays and Miramar is on that route. We come to the house or the apartment. Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more anywhere in the county, and $30 plus mileage below that. We count everything with you before it goes in the van, so you know what you are paying for.
How far is your studio from Miramar?
About 40 miles from the middle of the city, roughly an hour up I-75 to I-95 or the Turnpike. Miramar runs about twenty miles east to west, so it is closer to 35 miles from Historic Miramar and closer to 45 from the Town Center and the western communities. That is our only location. There is no drop-off counter in Miramar and no partner shop. Everything is digitized by our own staff in our own building in Boca Raton, so nothing is shipped out of state or handed to a third party.
What formats are most common from Miramar households?
VHS, VHS-C and Hi8 from the late eighties through the early two thousands, then MiniDV. Miramar is a younger city than most of Broward, so there is far more tape than film here. After tape it is loose prints and album pages, and a steady stream of older photographs that came in with a family and are often the only copy that exists.
My VHS tapes are from the early 1990s. Is the content still recoverable?
In most cases yes, and often in better shape than people expect. Even tapes with visible mold on the housing come back once the tape and shell have been cleaned properly before anything plays them. That order matters: one pass through a machine with a contaminated tape is what turns a recoverable tape into a lost one. What we cannot promise is a perfect result from a tape that was recorded badly in the first place, and we tell you that before you pay rather than after.
Can you digitize a whole estate or a house clear-out at once?
Yes, and that is a large part of what we do here. You do not need to sort anything first. We catalogue every item on intake, so you get an actual list of what was in those boxes, which is often the first time anyone in the family has known. At that volume the Thursday pickup is free.
What does it cost in total?
Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more. The digitizing is per item, not per box: ten tapes at $12 each is $120, photos are $0.50 each and slides $0.75. Estimates are free, so call with a rough count and we will give you a real number before we come out.
Preserving Florida's most important memories since 2007
Why Miramar families hand it to us.
One studio
Everything happens at 1000 Clint Moore Road. Never sub-contracted, never sent on to another facility.
Insured
Shipped back at declared value, or collect it from the studio yourself.
A+
BBB rating, with thousands of reviews across Reviews.io, Google, Facebook and Yelp.
3x checked
Every tape, reel and photo reviewed by the technician, the studio leader, and your project manager.
Talk to a real person right now
Tell us what is in the box.
We will tell you what it costs and what is worth doing, before anything moves. One call and we will put you on the route.
Pickup in Miramar
We come to you on Thursdays, free on orders of $250 or more and $30 plus mileage below that. Logged the day it lands, digitized in Boca Raton, carried back to you.
Or bring it yourself
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton, FL 33487. Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5.
Everything we do
Nearby locations
Forever Studios · Owner-operated in Boca Raton · Helping Florida families since 2007
Ready to digitize it right the first time?
Bring your tapes, film, and photos to the team that treats every project as irreplaceable. All work is handled in-house in Boca Raton, never outsourced.
